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Episode 73: Parenting styles, Millenials, Bringing back purpose
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all right welcome everybody dr. Lyle how are you doing this fine summer day I'm eating very good good all's well all's well well very good well we just had here in America we've had that fourth of July dr. loud do you know that they actually do you know if they have a fourth of July in England or not yes they do Oh don't yell abrade it what that oh I just kind of you know yeah all good yeah all right well we got a couple of questions that we're going to finish up for today we might have a live caller or so but let's just get right into it so okay all right dear dr. Lyle how do you deal with a partner who's intolerant to other partners opinions could be anything that you finance food a choice of how to spend free time and how to raise a child what is this signaling about this person and a follow-up question is my partner and I represent different cultures we have a child and have a different view on how to raise him I'm a very conscientious person so I strive for excellence and hard work require from my child to do work to the best of his ability and to do extra work whereas my partner has a pretty different approach use a lot less conscientious for him it's more important to give the child some more free time and an option to do whatever he wants what say you hmm well there's sort of two two questions here being asked and they're somewhat different and so the the overarching question is the notion that we've got two parents here two partners that are where they're having disagreements and so it sounds like the disagreements are you know among a range of issues and then the issue that specifically that would be the questioner is talking about is this issue of how to raise a child now two different cultures the the person who wrote this is obviously very conscientious talking about getting the kid to do extra work work the best of his ability et cetera so there's you know writing for excellence this all this all sound you know there are certain people in the world by virtue of their own high conscientiousness not to be racist but this is very typical of Asian cultures and so there's extremely high consciousness there and so the it sounds like the reason I say this it sounds like because these people are from two different cultures and I can imagine that the highly conscientious person could be Asian and it wouldn't be typical for a American to be complaining about someone else not being conscientious so that being the case the where that's likely being the case what we're talking about here then is anxiety because conscientiousness is fundamentally an anxious derivative so if you can imagine a bell curve of on conscientiousness and imagine that on the leap on the low conscientious side the person has very low anxiety and in the middle they have a medium amount of anxiety and the high side they have very high anxiety and so the high anxiety is essentially at the very upper reaches of this you can see that the person is overestimating the worst-case scenario the person on the low end of consciousness is under estimating the worst-case scenario and people in the middle of the bell curve are estimating the worst-case scenario typical for our species which means on average it's going to be pretty good now high conscientious people are extremely valuable for many things low conscience people are not valuable for much of anything but the words that characteristic of them is not valuable the high country you need somebody to do something really nasty and you just yeah you know like a hit man would be a good good thing if you if you wanted a cheap hit man you want somebody that's low in conscientiousness it's a perfect situation the but high conscience these are the people that you want running your company is this who you want in your HR department this is who you want ahead of your engineering team etc etc now so now we're going to have a disagreement between these two people who differ in their degree of conscientiousness in terms of child raising and so the conscientious individual is saying look I want the kid to work hard wanting to work harder etc etc and the other parent is saying wait a second I want to kid to have more free time now the what I'm going to say isn't necessarily consistent with an overarching strategy for how we would deal with this conflict more a broader conflict between the two people broader conflict between the two people let me address that first what we want to do is we want to sit down and have a little meeting and have you know pads paper in people's hands and what we want to do is we we want to have specific issues because we're not you can't change personalities all you can do is you can actually discuss issues and in the discussion of issues specific issues we're going to be asking questions and this is what I call crystal clear so your job is to ask enough questions that you really understand the other person's position in great detail and then you need to be able to say it back to them okay so this is a so it's essential that if I was going to be doing therapy or for a couple is going to do this themselves then they have to have a situation where they have to describe their position in their frustration and all the reasons for it in such detail that we have one person starting the other person to listen or questioner and the questioner has to be able to you know they're not going to argue in each of their position they're going to ask and ask and ask and ask and get finer and finer details until we're right down to the point where they can encapsulate and feedback what it is that the other person says okay now let me explain the reasons for this first of all there are certain problems between people that come up and they can get pretty unpleasant when they have in fact miscommunicated and they do not actually know the other person's position the second of all there's a strong tendency in humans to 101 arguments so we're going to we're going to refrain from that concept because we're not actually going to be the goal isn't to win the argument the goal is to to actually fully understand the other person's position as deeply as possible the the the second individual who's doing the listening and questioning isn't going to be making any statements or explaining their own position until they're completely finished with the first one so in this case doesn't matter who starts you can flip a coin and it doesn't make any difference one person starts and they talk and they talk and they talk and they talk and the other person is all they can do is ask questions clarify ask questions clarify okay they can be making clarification statements that are what we're going to call reflections of content so they can say so what I see that you are saying is this is how this works this out works and this is what you're worried about the other person says yes okay now there's great value to this technique and the reason the where it's a good thing is that the person who is God become is starting the first person who's complaining it is a great relief to see that your partner is taking the time and has the patience and is listening very carefully and then it's asking you very careful questions even if some of them are a little got a little bite to them there's a little argumentative tone doesn't matter we hang in there and we get it until the other person the person who's listening actually has what I call the are' arrive at what I call crystal clear so they have it absolutely crystal clear and they can explain the other person's position and they can feed it back to them and the original complaint is says yes yes yes yes yes you've got it okay so there's a great relief there because now person number one does not have to be anxious that their position is not fully understood and they don't have to be anxious that they didn't get it all said and that we're not in a rush here the way we are normally in an argument for somebody to win it in front of a audience we're going to take that out of the equation we're changing the structure of this dialogue and then we turn it around and now person number two now has a little different perspective and they can be making those comments like well I really had this issue but now I understand what you're saying on that so that's changed me a little bit but I still have this issue in this issue in this issue and now the issue with person number one is they have to do the same thing they have to get the crystal clear okay so the two people we have to have played this game that I call crystal clear and there's other other there's another thing that we can do to start this so when we do this the notion is you know sometimes people need some help they need to have that just modeled for them sometimes they need a you know a therapy hour with a therapist that knows what they're doing so that we can model and show how it is that we go about this conflict resolution the and then at the end if we have we can reach a very clear concept of what the nature of the chord disagreement is and then finally once we can understand what our chord disagreement is and there's no other smoke in the middle of this thing we know exactly what the disagreement is as best we can articulate it then our job is to essentially come up with some kind of a compromise or an experiment okay because sometimes the chord disagreements have a there's anxiety for example on the part of the more conscientious person oftentimes that the other person is being a flake and there's going to be costs associated with us doing it your way as opposed to doing it my way you can see this so let's suppose that we've got a husband and wife and the wife is 95th percentile conscientiousness of the husband is 70th in this case the wife's going to be having a lot of anxiety and frustration because she's going to be seeing problems coming that the husband doesn't seems oblivious to or doesn't care and this is going to be very frustrating and this is going to drive a sense that he does not value her opinion and she he is going to feel like she is essentially holier-than-thou and looking down on him and this is about a steam dynamic and so so by crystal clear what we're going to do is we're going to talk this through get down to the details now in this case we have a specific issue and the issue on the table here is she wants to drive the kid and make the kid you know super conscientious and successful etc and he doesn't he wants the kid to goof off and have fun now in this case what the crystal clear would be if I was doing this I would be asking her what are we trying to accomplish what are you thinking well I want him to be really successful okay and and I would say specifically like what like what what's the point what are we thinking and she would be saying well I want him to get really good grades and do things the best of his ability and work hard get you know do extra credit etc etc and we would say and why is that okay because we're seeking crystal clarity here and she would say well I want him to do as well as he possibly can and we would say well why is that and it'd be like well you know that isn't it obvious okay I want him to get the very highest GPA that he can in high school and you know he's in the third grade now we there's no time to waste we have to we have to make sure that he is as prepared as possible because he has to get the highest possible test scores and the highest possible GPA and we have to ingrain habits in him so that he's a very hard worker highly conscientious individual so notice that there's an implication that we're going to influence long term personality characteristics by by this which we will not by the way so we have a mistake okay so then what we're going to continue on and we're going to find out that this parent you know wants him to you know get the best possible grade so we've got the very best high school grades now this seems incredibly reasonable to highly conscientious individual let's find out why because she's going to say because I want him to get into very best college that he can okay and you know what there might you know 1/10 of a percent you know difference in his GPA or 20 points on the SAT a few points in a couple of questions that could be the difference between him getting into you know Brown University or North University of North Carolina and so this is of enormous importance that we squeeze out every possible that has status that we can get out of this ok all right so now we're understanding where she's coming from she's got anxiety she wants to reach as high as possible why okay well that should be obvious to all of us but were sometimes not listening that she wants him to have the very finest pedigree possible on his resume so he can get a good job know the inferences if he goes to the University of North Carolina he'll never get a good job okay so the so he must get into what did I say Universal vania or Brown and can't remember where South Carolina yeah no she's head to North Carolina instead the Ivy League okay this is a devastating failure now this case for the Tar Heels out there I'm sorry sorry John hey listen Jordan went to your school your school wins all right so so it was kids so now we got this third grader we got a lot of pressure on because he's he's he's heading for the Ivy League if this woman has you know anything to say about it and and he has to get there because then he is going to get the best job or actually not even a job yet we got to go to grad school first so if he goes to Carolina he can't get into a top-tier drag school where he goes to brown he might inch his way into Harvard Law School okay so we're aiming for Harvard okay so M so now if he if he goes North Carolina there's no ways getting into Harvard this is horrendous to the high conscientious individual as she sees all these doors shut in the paths blocked because the kid is not going to wind up you know with his first job going to be at Goldman Sachs $450,000 coming out of Glaus school and so this is a this is a quiet tragedy so we are not going to have that tragedy we're going to work that kid to the bone starting in the third grade every time he comes home from school you know he's going to he's going to you know take it you have a little snack taking a little short 15-minute nap and then boom or get into the homework this is also we don't have the horrendous outcome of winding up at Georgetown Law School when we could have been at Harvard and you know this would just be a disaster now this is actually what's going on and why is this well because the woman's son you know I mean we need to we need to have him have every bit of possible cachet because it might make a difference in who he mates with and if he goes to Georgetown he might you know he's a seven and a half he might wind up with a horrendous situation where his future wife might only be an eight and a half whereas if he goes to Harvard he's likely to get a nine okay so therefore instead of her grandchildren being the product of a seven and a half and an eight and a half which makes them an eight they're going to be a product of seven half and a nine which is going to make demin eight and a quarter so by making them 0.25 points more attractive this statistically increases the likelihood of genes survival for her okay no no yeah I'm not even close to being done but you go ahead and interact add this yeah when you put it that way yeah I've asked curious if you've ever gotten to crystal clear and you keep going through the through the questions and the mother or the father say well obviously it's because I want the best genes on the planet a couple of generations from now oh I gotta admit nobody's ever called my bluff so that's very good I'll wait for some day out there in the future that's going to happen in it very good yeah so the bottom line is is that if the if for grandchild is 0.25 points more sexually attractive that's very likely the great-grandchildren will be point one to five more attractive and her great-great grand shoulder we'll be 0.06 you know whatever that is corrective so these are very important chips on the line if you're highly conscientious individual and it's important that we find out that they learn that that's what's driving their anxiety and so this is this is a sequence that I explained that I call why mom cares and the reason why this is on my website is team dynamics dot-org the why mom cares is because in the Stone Age it wasn't when your kid you kid didn't graduate from Georgetown and basically have a huge mating pool in front of them he's going to be picking his way through 150 options and he's going to optimize what he can get out of those hundred 50 options and the very top are going to be out and very anything below him is going to be out so he's going to be essentially fighting it out within a ten percentile trading range and in the Stone Age that wouldn't be possible because you wouldn't have a multitude of options within a narrow trading range your if you get the nine you get the nine if you don't get the nine the next one down might be a six and so as a result if you're the mother of that kid who might be able to compete for the nine you push them like crazy okay so the anxiety is is that there's going to be a very big difference in mating outcomes as opposed to the fact that the kid is designed by nature to to fight it out reasonably to try to get to the to to get us do genetic do and they have a certain amount of conscientiousness and intelligence and charm to get them to make the best deal that they can and they will not they will not they're not very likely to screw this up now I'm not saying that they don't sometimes make bad choices but I would say that when the kids make bad choices the parents would have made worse choices for them so in this case I would vote for the for the dad is what I'm assuming might maybe I could be flipping this thing around and we could have a super conscientious father and a flaky mother but I doubt it so the in this case that I have a principle when it comes - looking at life and the conflicts between individuals and that is that we should have a situation where we are optimizing as much freedom as possible for all individuals that you want in theory you want relationships to be as much benefit in as little cost as possible and you want individuals to be as free as possible of constraint to do whatever it is that they want so long as they're not forcibly interfering with the rights of people to do the same so if your child wants to play video games all day they are not forcibly interfering with you and so my attitude is they get to play now they have certain reasonable responsibilities which is to you know do reasonably well in school it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference how well they do in school any step of the way they will become informed and it will be obvious to them as they get a little bit older that that there's actually things called GPAs and they actually matter and if I have a kid that I think is significantly underperforming and actually closing doors on himself in high school for what could be a better college career I would probably let him shut those doors let him suffer and that's because he can always wake up later when he's a little bit older and reclaim his genetic greatness by going to the junior college and doing excellent work and I wouldn't have him go to the junior college and wreck his GPA if he's going to still be a flake when he's 18 then I'm going to have him pick up a rag and work at a car wash and he's not going to go to the JC and so he'll go to school when he's ready and he's finally ready to do it he's got a purpose and he wants to do well because he's got some target in mind so in general the concept of human nature in relationships is that we want to maximize the amount of freedom so in this case my attitude would be we would give this kid as much freedom as this is all reasonable and we're running an experiment we're going to find out just how bad it gets we're going to find out whether or not he flunks out or whether or not he responds reasonably if he does not respond reasonably to a challenge that he's supposed to do X well in school and instead he's screwing up and misusing his time and he's addicted to video games or whatever it is that he's doing then we take the video games away it's not a problem okay until he can improve his performance but we begin the process by maximizing the freedom our job is to not optimize this kid's performance and some competitive pursuits in a wider cultural dominance hierarchy into his future okay we want to inform him of that we wanted him to know that there's a wide competitive delmas hierarchy and we want him to be computing that along the way but the truth is he will be computing that later in his adolescence when he can see the handwriting on the wall and he we inform him that there's things like tiers of colleges you know and it's important if he's if he has the ability to do much better than he should should be trying to sniff the coffee here and to figure out that he wants fancier stripes on his head in order to mark himself as a better specimen for the rest of his life so we are certainly going to inform him of that later but the the variance is in where he's going to go are not going to be determined we 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 years old that's not when these variances are going to be determined so we optimized the kids life by letting them play let him in goof off as much fun as possible those days about having as much fun as possible are just as important as the days to come a day at 13 years old goofing off and having fun with your friends is just as important as some day at 52 and so too to make this a grind and I believe kids are way too stressed and pressure today by conscientious parents in academic competition and the bottom line is is that your kids will you know eventually fight it out and figure out that they need to get serious at some point and you can be there to remind them just in case they missed it but we don't have to put their nose to the grindstone not unless they're really screwing up and then we need to we need to look at that you know and we did we need to deal with each of those on an individual basis fantastic okay well this ties alright this ties in oh I'm sorry - did - ahead did I interrupt you go right ahead okay well this brings up right into the next question which talks about the kid who has been who was pressuring himself so this question for dr. Lisle okay so dear dr. Lisle I was born to a lower middle class family in India and when I was a kid I had this fire in me to work hard on my studies get a good job and lift my family and its status and when I look back I think of my childhood as a very happy period despite financial struggles and the lack of resources in general but what's happened to me as I've grown up is this lack of purpose after turning 18 which is when I moved out from home in college I've continuously got lazier day-by-day I did complete college somehow but I have low self esteem about it since I had to show that since I simply exploited loopholes in the system nothing illegal I just figured out how to clear exams by doing just enough and I didn't really work much to get my degree and then I worked for a few years in software development from a company where I got even more lazy and even when I was taking lots of unplanned leaves and slacking off I was apparently given recognition at work this kind of led me to a phase of life where I believed I was living the life of the dude in the movie Big Lebowski but all this slacking off and get away getting away with it has come at a cost I feel gravely unhappy and I can't remember when I was genuinely happy others look at me and tell me I have a great career and a promising future but honestly I feel pretty dead inside once the reality sinks in and this attitude towards life has made my health in poor shape and I know that I may live a lot less if I continue this lifestyle but I'm not really putting in any effort to move my life in any different trajectory so my question to you dr. Lyle is this how can I bring back some purpose into my life great question wonderful fascinating a fantastic client question here actually so let's let's look at this and see what we can learn that this person has had a as it has had an unusual life trajectory and that is that it found this is what has happened is is that they they had as a result of a vey impoverished upbringing financially not psychologically they now come to the United States or wherever it is that they are and they are able to by virtue of being very bright and getting into high tech etc they wind up actually passing over or exceeding what the early essentially target was and so they've actually the feedback from the world has been better than expected which is very nice in other words it's it's kind of it's kind of an interesting situation we're finding that he's thinking or she is feeling like they are getting bit more feedback than me than they deserve now the certainly in many ways in many ways is better to be in that situation than to be in the other situation but not always the what's happening there's there there could be definitely some ego trap problems going on here but there's something else that's going on and that is that the the mind is running complicated cost-benefit analysis on alternative courses of action that's what it's doing and this individual is sort of looking out at the cost-benefit options that are in front of him and he's savvy enough that he can he seems to be able to get good benefit from relatively mediocre effort good enough benefit in other words he's comfortable this this reminds me of an animal in a zoo so if you're an animal in a zoo they you know you're some lion in the zoo you know the guy comes by and throws you a steak a couple times a day it's like it's not bad you know it's not too bad it's not too good you're not doing anything you're not really getting to be a lion so this individual is essentially protected by a lot of financial success to the point where he doesn't have to do any lion behavior and as a result he is he is not even close to living up to his potential he's in a zoo and the problem with this is that the outside world is actually not particularly giving him any negative feedback probably a nice looking guy good social skills he's done well you know has good stuff it's like hey this uh if you got enough brains and you're landing in high-tech and things have gone well for you everything looks great and now the except that a major component of human happiness is the the self-esteem mechanism or the internal audience so while we are sensitive very sensitive to feedback from other people in this case friendships romantic potential partners and trade and even family everybody can be given this guy pretty good feedback and yet his internal audience is actually judging him relative to what there's some suspicion about what it is that he could be capable of doing so the internal audience is seeing other people out there may actually be believing that he's trying harder and making mo socially but he's reaching eighty percent of his abilities just like everybody else's but the truth is this guy could be cruising along on 50% of his abilities everybody thinks he's doing perfectly reasonable but if they knew he was cruising as lackadaisically as he is they would be kind of disgusted which is exactly what the internal audience is there for the internal audience is there as a feedback mechanism to the individual telling them what other people would think if they were to observe our performances okay so the and so as a result the other people would say god what a waste of life okay Wow you could be doing so much more with your life why aren't you doing something so this is exactly the feedback that he's getting from the inside so you can hear it and the problem is the there could be overly high expectations from the self in some ways there there could be I'm not sure what is actually going on I'd have to ask this person and sort of talk them through but I feel like they're an animal in a comfortable zoo and all I can tell you is that you're the thing that that the thing that is causing the suffering in this individuals life is unbelievable and that it is essentially entirely under his control so this is not true for most people most people have goals and desires that can exceed their ability to reach them and they will have a great deal of frustration as they make efforts and then fail okay this person is not having that situation so this person this person's only problem is the internal audience and the problem is is that he doesn't have a lot of force from the outside saying we're rejecting you unless you perform better so he can cruise cruise along here at you know if he's a Lamborghini cruising along at 55 miles an hour and this is you know this is no way to drive a Lamborghini so I would I would say this that this person should run an experiment okay they should run an experiment and we can use a variety of mental techniques to get them to run this experiment but one experiment would be to make a short list of things that they might want to change about you know about their situation and one of them might be for example his physical fitness one of them might be whether or not he's really doing the job do this best of his ability and it can be a bizarre and exciting experiment to get yourself ready I usually don't have people flip a switch on this light just as it's occurring to them I have them get ready for it so for example this week this is now what Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday okay he could get ready and his day one could be next Monday so what we're going to do is we're going to have like no junk food in the house we're going to get a calendar out we're going to figure out when we're going to work out we're going to work out daily but we're not going to work out super hard we're going to work out medium hard everyday okay and we're going to eat healthy food we're going to set the clock where you can get to bed on time and then we're going to have we're going to think about actually when we're at work our plan is going to be to do the job to the very best of our ability okay and the notion is I want you to feel like that you are a kingpin right at the center of saving hundreds of thousands of life in warfare and your job is to actually do everything to the very best of your ability during those hours where you're responsible you are not responsible we're not in an emergency situation where you know five o'clock you get to punch out or six okay so you you that person actually would be a very good thing for them to stay a half hour late and work not just to be showing off the through there but actually work put in an extra half an hour okay if you do this this person will do this for two weeks get up work you know work out go to go go to work do a superlative job okay do the very best job you can not in a frenetic crazy way but just one judgment after the next focus execute focus execute okay if you if you do your job too efficiently and you get ahead of the game you ask your superior what else you can do okay so you know don't don't go crazy here to land yourself in a bucket of trouble but the point is is be smart about it but push your agendas essentially try to get superbly organized and move ahead this is a very interesting two-week experiment that I believe that you will find in a couple of weeks if you will put your the metal your internal audience will actually start to be impressed an internal audience will start to say this is fascinating that this actually feels good and we are actually going to kick out some pride in into your nervous system we're going to signal this to the esteem meter to the self that we respect what it is that you're doing okay guess what there's no other way to activate the system there's no other way to do it the pride mechanism is there to signal to you when the internal audience knows you have done you're done a very good job that you don't have to do your very best but you have done an excellent job and the internal audience says well done okay and so it will kick out the pride mechanism now if you go buy an old chair you know from a swap meet and take it home and get a can of paint from Home Depot and sand down to paint it it's going to give you a little bit of pride because it wasn't that hard but you did do something diligent and you was a little bit productive so it gave you a little bit but if you take on you know more seriousness you know you're trying to do your work in an excellent fashion you can find that this can turn can turn you around I will tell you an interesting story a good friend of mine was married I actually do have a couple of friends with mannequin Harry and his wife had a father and that father way back when he was young he worked I can't remember what he worked in it but it was back in like New Jersey so he worked in some Factory and it was before the day that the factory was unionized so as a young man for the first couple years of his career he felt the competitive pressure that you could lose your job and that you had to demonstrate that you were really good or that they might canyon so he he actually liked his job and he went there and he worked as effectively and intelligently as possible then the union's came in and used the shop and then there was a lot of pressure to not be so good and essentially the the culture changed dramatically and basically all about flaking out and not working that hard and so for the next 40 years this guy hated his job and about a year before his retirement for some reason months before he decided one day that he was going to change it up and he was going to work really hard again this is very interesting so he did okay and it started disturbing people and he had the attitude of the hell with you you know I'm 63 years old I've got my retirement anyway I'm going to work to him 65 and basically I don't give a damn I've been at this company for 37 years or whatever it is he's just going to do it and he did it okay and he loved his job again isn't that interesting Wow so can he this can you move over to over here there's a freeway section that I'm working on for like seven years it's like a small section they won't even finish it but he's probably retired by nine and happy to die that be true so anyway this is this is the point and this is the message to our to our person that that you're your own happiness is actually in your own hands and so we have to realize that you're in a funny little trap this is a this is a variant of what I call the pleasure trap and that is that animals are designed by nature to pursue pleasure boid pain and conserve energy and this person is in energy conservation mode and is essentially doing the minimum and by doing the minimum he's basically in the zoo he's getting fed his steaks and everything's okay but it's not okay okay and so don't make the mistake that this guy did for 37 years and basically be kind of miserable and self disgusted for 37 years instead pick yourself up by your bootstraps realize you're in a very interesting trap work directly against your instincts here and in fact expend energy and in doing so you're going to break through some of these barriers and my guess is that there are this person has this kind of talent that there are very interesting and exciting and even potentially a little bit career dangerous things for this person to be doing person needs to extend themselves and be in a much more adventurous situation this is why a lot of these guys love they absolutely love startups okay so if you get a start-up with twelve people in it and everybody's got a plan to get rich you know there's a there's a degree of excitement there that is you just are not going to find working from mattel it's just never going to happen and so this person may be in a big solid firm that you know the paychecks just keep coming like a machine and that could be a problem so first experiment and find out how much leverage you have over your own internal audience but in fact your happiness is in your own hands and then after that we start thinking about major structural changes in this person's life that may be in order because they need to be challenged we need to let the lion out of the zoo and let them be a lion and at that point they're going to be a lot happier Wow well we've got two more questions one of them has to do with Millennials epi' one has to do with more parenting styles but before we get to those two we actually have a caller on the line okay so I'm going to bring in this caller caller how you doing today what's your name and where are you calling from hello no yes caller oh can you can you hear us I think oh what's your name where you calling from this is AJ AJ yeah welcome to yeah back to the show I love this show is there is there a support group because I'm addicted to it now and I listened to it like four hours a day is there can I is there somewhere to go because I'm soaked into this podcast it's like I can't stop listening and and I end up on the spin bike for like four hours because I'm so it drawn in it's so good and I've told so many people about it but actually that's not why I'm calling yeah so every time you say one thing I think of like ten questions but I get where you're coming from you say like the purpose of life is pass on our genes and all that kind of stuff I get it so if that's true then why people want to continue having sex when when reproduction is impossible so men that have had vasectomies postmenopausal women old men in a nursing home why on earth would people still want to have sex when they can't pass on their genes anymore because the system is designed with goals it's not designed to be that savvy about when the stops us believe me some old guy in the nursing home he's still thinking that he could knock somebody up I know because I've met some of those guys I've worked in the nursing home for a short bit and believe me that's still drifting through their heads and amazingly even postmenopausal women are very conscious of the attractiveness and they may not they may or may not be very sexualized in their psychology but they are still feeling the competitive issues and they yeah they still want to be sexually attractive even though they might not want to do anything about it so I believe me there are postmenopausal women that are very sexual and interested you know interested so this is all sort of individual differences here but but yeah the machine is is sort of a fixed machine it's a think of it is a very sophisticated robot that has programs in it and the programs are are diverse so I think you'll see for example in males and females as they age you will see a shifting of the program's of the female to what we're going to call you know grandmother circuits so essentially reproduction for them becomes aiding abetting their grandchildren's ability to compete in their generations and therefore be more seks sexually successful so that whereas a male at 65 which believe me I'm that's not that far over the right yeah point is is that believe me I have every evidence that at 65 I'm going to be as interested in theoretically knocking somebody up as I ever was Pacino like my sister didn't live this long so they weren't having sex into their you know 60s and 80s for women it gets harder sometimes physiologically to have sex you know like hurt they get you know all these these complications and yet they still want to do it yeah oh well life physical you know I love them ever you know what at some point AJ when you're when you're 50 years old you're just out of warranty that's oh do it but so it's not about the dopamine it's not because we just are constantly looking for sources of dopamine and sex is one of the ways to get them it has nothing to do with that it's all about two genes and passing them on I'm not sure kind of what your thing the dopamine is a is one of many devices that is used to encourage behavior that is that it could be it could be biologically successful so so the dope but dopamine is just one thing dopamine I've talked a lot about in my career because my career has been a lot related to the drug like properties of processed food and the fact that it's hard for people to get away from them and then they get overweight and they have sickness etc but but the when it comes to motivation more globally it's happening with many different signalling devices in terms of neurotransmitters many different kinds of feeling so we're seeking every every little type of mood shift that a human has is a signal to tell it whether whether those circumstances are either conducive to genes survival or or deleterious and so those are little yeah those are the little mood shifts that you have literally when your toe hurts and it's like hanging a little a little frustrated about this or you put on a pair of shoes it's a little tight and and you get home and you love the shoes because you thought they made you look sexy but now your feet hurt and now you're frustrated that you allowed yourself to do that you should have got the bigger clunky ones and sacrificed a little sexual attractiveness like this is all the stuff that that human Figgs nagar yeah well you know dogs dogs don't have sex unless reproduction as possible you know what I mean like they won't they'll just do it unless they're like the female dog unless she's in heat she doesn't have sex right yeah so well the different anything yeah human beings actually cloak their sexual ah the female cloaks her her the female is designed by nature unlike a dog a female human is trying to keep a mate around so that they'll continue to provision offspring oh yeah yeah so this is this is all let me tell you chicks are using sex to learn males doing stuff for like what a shot this is that is exactly what's going on at the fundamental root of it there that is in the game yeah that's so funny but even when we don't have kids we still do it right I mean we still gotta keep the main around yeah I mean you know if we don't have offspring the provision we want to art we want ourselves provision I guess yes yeah absolutely that's exactly what's happening yes it just kind of depresses me no it's ran this is a grand vision of human nature and in fact it's really the most spectacular insight I believe in the history of our species that that there have been many brilliant insights there have been Einsteins and there have been Newton's but to actually understand what we are what we're here for in other words what our purpose is and how it is that we operate and on what you know essentially we're able now to look inside the programming of what it means to be a human and to understand it I think the the the implications for improvement on human life not an improvement on humans but improvement in human relationships and how it is that they negotiate conflicts etc I think there's there's spectacular promise for greater understanding I don't see how you'd ever be able to get married because you always would know what people are doing alright that's a topic for another night AJ thanks so much I love your show take care bye thank you you bet thanks Reggie for the call really appreciate it
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